TidBITS#1125/07-May-2012
========================
Issue link:
What would you do if your Apple ID-backed accounts became
inaccessible? That’s what Chris Owen ran into when Apple seemingly
corrupted his account — read on for his entire story and think about
how you’d work around such a problem. Also this week, Jeff Carlson
covers iOS 5.1.1’s fixes quickly, and Glenn Fleishman looks at both
Amazon’s weak Cloud Drive desktop app and the new connection between
Tweetbot and Storify. Finally, Adam points to a new worldwide
photography project that everyone can contribute to and describes a
new internal tool that’s possible only because of Mac OS X’s
inter-application communication. Notable software releases this week
include Alfred 1.2, Transmit 4.1.9, SpamSieve 2.9.1, and Hazel 3.0.5.
Articles
iOS 5.1.1 Addresses Bugs
Contribute Photos from May 15th to Aday.org
Amazon Releases Cloud Drive Desktop App
Capture Twitter Conversations with Tweetbot and Storify
PodBOT Improves TidBITS Audio
Apple ID Horror Story
TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 7 May 2012
ExtraBITS for 7 May 2012
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iOS 5.1.1 Addresses Bugs
------------------------
by Jeff Carlson
article link:
Apple today released iOS 5.1.1, a bug-fix update that addresses a
handful of disclosed issues for all iOS 5-compatible devices. From
Apple’s tech note, iOS 5.1.1:
* Improves reliability of using HDR option for photos taken using the
Lock Screen shortcut
* Addresses bugs that could prevent the third-generation iPad from
switching between 2G and 3G networks
* Fixes bugs that affected AirPlay video playback in some
circumstances
* Improves reliability for syncing Safari bookmarks and Reading List
* Fixes an issue where an “Unable to purchase” alert could be
displayed after successful purchase
Apple has not yet released information about the security content of
the update on the Web, but the Apple Product Security mailing list
reports that security fixes address a Safari vulnerability that
enabled a malicious Web site to spoof the address in the location
bar, multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in WebKit, and a
memory corruption vulnerability in WebKit.
To get iOS 5.1.1, do one of the following:
* In iTunes, select the iOS device in the sidebar and click Check for
Update on the Summary screen. The download in iTunes will be very
large — up to 1 GB in size — so don’t use this option if
you’re in a hurry or low on disk space on your Mac.
* On the device itself, go to Settings > General > Software Update.
The direct-to-device update is much smaller — in the 40 MB to 50
MB range, and will thus be a much faster download.
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Contribute Photos from May 15th to Aday.org
-------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
On 15 May 2012, the Swedish non-profit foundation Expressions of
Humankind is organizing one of those events — aday.org — that
makes sense only in the Internet age. On that day, they’re asking
everyone who wants to participate to pick up a camera and take
digital photos of your daily life. Once you’ve uploaded them —
up to 10 per person — the group will be connecting your images to
others from around the world and displaying them all online for
everyone to explore. Photos will also be donated to historical
institutions around the world for preservation and, if selected and
if the individual photographers agree, included in a book, “A Day
in the World,” and in digital exhibitions. None will be used for
commercial purposes.
Adding a level of interest to the project is the categorization and
keywording that participants will apply to their photos. There are
three main categories — Home, Work, and Connections (anything that
connects us to one another) — and each main category has a number
of subcategories. Finally, aday.org has pre-defined some keywords
within most of the subcategories, and you can add your own keywords
as well — the more specific your keywords, the more your photos
can be grouped with others that have been defined similarly.
Aday.org is backed by some big names — including Archbishop
Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson, among a collection of
scientists and former European heads of state — and was co-founded
by Jeppe Wikström, a well-known Swedish photographer who initiated
a similar photographic project called “A Day in the Life of
Sweden” (he sounds like a Swedish version of Rick Smolan, who has
coordinated a number of massive photography projects). A number of
major companies have also signed on to provide financial and
technical assistance, including Ericsson, Snapfish,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, and more. Here’s hoping the technical
infrastructure manages to hold up on May 15th, though aday.org will
be accepting photos shot on that day for another few days
afterwards. The uploading tool won’t be available until then,
though you can sign up now to speed the process, and I’m told that
early registrants will also receive ideas of what to shoot,
feedback, and other information.
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Amazon Releases Cloud Drive Desktop App
---------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
Playing catch-up, but still lagging behind, Amazon has released the
Amazon Cloud Drive desktop app for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.6 Snow
Leopard (as well as Windows Vista and 7). The software provides
Finder-based uploads to the company’s Cloud Drive service, but
doesn’t provide synchronization or true Desktop integration as a
folder or drive. Nor can you use the app to download files.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive service is an amalgam of a music-storage
locker and file storage, but it has lacked a desktop component until
now. Or rather, it still does — the desktop app is a half measure
that doesn’t compare to even the worst of the file synchronization
and storage services from competitors like Dropbox, Google, and
Microsoft (see “Google Drive and SkyDrive Take Aim at Dropbox,”
24 April 2012). Apple is the only company with which there’s no
comparison, because after iDisk goes to its watery grave on 30 June
2012, Apple will no longer have any desktop file synchronization at
all.
After installing the Cloud Drive desktop app, a generic cloud icon
(good choice, guys) appears in the system menu bar. To upload files,
you drag an item to the cloud icon until a green plus sign in a
circle appears. You can also Control-click any file or folder in the
Finder and choose Upload to Cloud Drive from the contextual menu.
(You may need to restart your computer to see this menu. It didn’t
show up on my Mac initially, and even relaunching the Finder
wasn’t sufficient.)
The Cloud Drive app’s page promotes downloads: “Easy download of
one or more files and folders from Cloud Drive.” But this isn’t
the case. The program’s tour, which you can view after
installation or from its Help menu, says you must use the Web to
download files. In my book, that’s not “easy.”
Amazon offers 5 GB of storage for free accounts, although storage of
Amazon-purchased music doesn’t reduce that amount. Paid storage
starts at $20 per year for 20 GB of storage, and paid accounts
don’t count any Amazon-purchased or uploaded music files towards
storage limits. (For more details about Amazon’s very decent
Web-based media access, see “Amazon Beats Apple at Ease of Media
Access,” 17 November 2011.)
I was asked a few days ago where Amazon had positioned itself after
Google launched Google Drive and Microsoft overhauled SkyDrive. The
answer? Well behind the curve.
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Capture Twitter Conversations with Tweetbot and Storify
-------------------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I live on Twitter,
where I enjoy many interesting conversations, some rapid and some
languorous. Twitter has the concept of threading built in, and good
Twitter clients correctly create a conversation you can view.
Storify is one of several services that lets you build plain or
annotated narratives from a variety of publicly available sources,
including Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. The site has an interactive
drag-and-drop approach to finding messages or posts and putting them
into the construct of a story. A few weeks ago, some Twitter buddies
and I constructed an impromptu and silly Apple-themed parody of
“2001: A Space Odyssey” that I captured in Storify. Without
Storify, that nonsense would have been lost forever. (Some might
think that a good thing.)
It’s not just for nonsense. Storify allows the ephemeral to be
captured if it’s worthwhile. While Twitter may seem a hive of
triviality, and Facebook only for personal chit-chat about babies
and political rants, an enormous amount of communication happens.
Nearly all of it may deserve to hit the bit bucket.
But for those cases in which something more than idle chatter
emerges, Storify enables you to preserve and structure a discussion.
You can write connective material to explain how the narrative
you’re presenting holds together, share it in a way that anyone
can read, and allow comments on it. For me, this becomes useful when
I have an informative discussion in which the back and forth leads
me to new knowledge. For others, capturing a conversation among
participants in an issue, whether reporters discussing a story,
public figures arguing a point, or activists planning their next
move, keeps that moment fixed for review and citation.
My go-to Twitter client of choice in iOS is Tweetbot ($2.99,
separate iPhone/iPod touch and iPad versions), whose approach to
Twitter flow and conversations matches my conception of such
interaction. You can swipe right on any tweet, and Tweetbot reveals
any associated threaded discussion. (A version of Tweetbot for Mac
OS X is apparently coming, but it’s not yet in public beta.)
Now two great tastes have come together: Tweetbot’s latest update,
version 2.3, has direct support for publishing to Storify. View any
conversation, tap the action button (the arrow in a box) in the
upper-right corner of the screen, and choose to email or tweet a
link. The conversation is stored in Storify, even if you don’t
ultimately send the email or post the tweet. You can then log in to
Storify with your Twitter account, and edit and frame the
conversation. If you have an existing Storify account linked to your
Twitter account, the post will also be linked to your collection of
stories.
You may post messages to Twitter that you’d like to sink to the
bottom of the sea of bits forever. But I find increasingly that
smart ideas are captured in the ad hoc banter there. Tweetbot’s
connection with Storify should make it simpler to archive dialectics
for later dissection.
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PodBOT Improves TidBITS Audio
-----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
Did you know that you can listen to an audio version of every
TidBITS article we publish? A loyal TidBITS reader at the MacTech
Boot Camp conference was telling me how much he enjoyed our staff
podcast appearances on MacBreak Weekly, MacVoices, the Tech Night
Owl Live, and more. But when I asked if he listened to the audio
versions of our articles, he pleaded ignorance.
So, for the record, if you want to listen to TidBITS on your iPhone,
iPod, iPad, or Mac, you can. For a single article, look for a Listen
link in the metadata line on headline pages and at the very top of
articles. And for a podcast that can be automatically synced to your
preferred listening device, the easiest way to subscribe is via
iTunes (the link is in the upper left of the TidBITS site, in the
“Get TidBITS via...” box). We generally record articles on
Monday, just before the email issue goes out, so the audio versions
are best for those who don’t want to keep up with our coverage on
a daily basis.
What I wanted to share with you was not the mere fact of our audio
editions, but how we just improved their quality, thanks to help
from a friend. One of the problems we’ve had is that we generally
each record our own articles, and it’s nearly impossible to ensure
identical input volume settings. So one person might be acceptably
loud and the next rather quiet, necessitating much fiddling with
volume controls. Not ideal while driving!
The solution to this problem is The Levelator, free software
developed by The Conversations Network, a California non-profit.
Through some advanced magic, The Levelator makes audio files use a
consistent loudness. It was designed to automate the post-production
work of making multiple people in an interview sound equally loud,
as well as to eliminate loudness variations from one podcast to
another.
Although The Levelator runs on Mac OS X, calling it a Mac program is
a stretch. It has no settings, next to no interface (you simply drop
a WAV or AIFF file on it), and it’s not scriptable, which makes it
difficult to integrate into an automated workflow. And workflow is
extremely important to us, since our dirty little secret is that
we’re recording these audio versions not because we want to make
the best possible podcast, but because we’re already reading our
articles out loud as a final proofing pass. (It’s an effective way
of catching subtle typos and other infelicities.)
So we need the process to be as simple and streamlined as possible,
and adding The Levelator into the mix was going to cause headaches.
Previously, our standard workflow involved recording directly in
Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro, where the recording, encoding,
file naming, and metadata assignment could all take place in a
single step. Since The Levelator works on uncompressed WAV and AIFF
files and creates a new file in the process, names and metadata have
to be assigned after the fact. It’s not hard to do that, but
it’s tedious and repetitive, especially late on a Monday night
when all I want to do is make dinner.
While searching for a solution to this problem, I ran across a few
relevant scripts on the excellent Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
site, which collects a vast number of utility scripts for
controlling iTunes, managing music, converting files, and more. None
were quite what I needed though, and my AppleScript skills are
minimal, so I decided to ask Doug Adams himself if he might be able
to help out. He’s a long-time TidBITS reader, and was enthusiastic
about helping to build a tool that would give us a streamlined
interface for our audio versions.
Our tool, which came to be known as PodBOT, needed to do four basic
things, in this order:
1. Open a WAV or AIFF file (recorded with Audio Hijack Pro or
GarageBand) with The Levelator to get the consistent loudness we
wanted.
2. Convert The Levelator’s output file (which has a predictable name
and location) to a much smaller 48 Kbps AAC file. PodBOT does this
via the command-line program afconvert.
3. Collect metadata about the audio file — file name, title, author,
issue number, article text, and more — and embed it into the
audio file so it looks good in iTunes (for instance, the article
text appear in the Lyrics field in iTunes). For this, PodBOT leans
on iTunes, since Doug knew how to get iTunes to assign such
metadata without leaving a copy of the file cluttering the library.
4. Optionally, upload the file to our server via SFTP and tickle the
TidBITS Publishing System into linking the file to its article. We
chose to use either Transmit or Fetch, both of which are easily
scriptable in such a way that PodBOT could rely on an existing
bookmark that already contained the necessary credentials.
Doug ended up writing PodBOT as a simple Cocoa application that
encapsulates a lot of AppleScript, and it’s finely honed to our
exact needs, looking up data for each recording from the TidBITS
Publishing System automatically when possible. Much of the rest of
the metadata it assigns never changes or is programmatic (like the
date), and PodBOT doesn’t even offer fields for those items. For
the few fields that require personalized input, like Voiced By,
PodBOT remembers the previous setting so it doesn’t have to be
entered each time. And simple options like whether or not to trash
the original and final files after successful upload let each of our
editors decide how much data they want to keep locally.
Even better, since PodBOT is happy to create the final file without
uploading, we can give it and some simple instructions to outside
authors who want to record their own articles, without worrying
about needing to get their audio settings to match ours or telling
them exactly how to find and format the metadata, since it’s all
looked up automatically.
I feel a little weird writing this article, since PodBOT is an
internal tool, and not something that would be useful to anyone
outside TidBITS. But the more general lesson that developing PodBOT
has hammered home is that one of the key benefits Mac OS X has over
iOS is its capability to tie multiple applications together, rather
than requiring a single app to do absolutely everything. I love iOS
for what it can do, but it can’t always hold a candle to what Mac
OS X makes possible. Similarly, although there’s no question that
sandboxing in Mac OS X provides some security and reliability
advantages, the loss of being able to integrate multiple
applications into a single workflow would be devastating to many
industries (see “The Sandbox Conundrum: Security vs.
Innovation,” 28 February 2012). AppleScript itself was saved from
the chopping block when Steve Jobs first returned to Apple because
it was such a necessary workflow component in the publishing
industry; Apple may be a very different company now, but that
doesn’t mean that any less work gets done on Macs.
In the end, thanks to Doug Adams for his highly capable and
enthusiastic development efforts, thanks to The Conversations
Network for The Levelator, and thanks to Apple for continuing to
make an operating system that enables multiple applications to work
together to create something that’s far easier to use than the
individual parts. Let’s hope future versions of Mac OS X don’t
make highly specific utilities like PodBOT impossible by confining
most apps to a sandbox and reducing support for inter-application
communication technologies.
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Apple ID Horror Story
---------------------
by Chris Owen
article link:
24 comments
[Adam here. Chris Owen sent me this tale of woe as evidence that
there are issues with the iTunes account security changes that I
wrote about in “Apple Extends iTunes Account Security, Confuses
Users” (26 April 2012). What I find more perturbing, though, is
that Apple IDs have become far more important than in the past,
thanks to iCloud’s deep integration with Mac OS X for essential
data like email, events, and contacts. Obviously, Apple has a vested
interest in making sure iCloud services work properly, but since
they’re largely provided for free (with payments only for iTunes
Match and additional storage), Apple isn’t offering easily
accessed technical support. After you read Chris’s story, think
about how you might be affected if your iCloud account information
were to be corrupted or deleted.]
I had heard anecdotally that some people had been having issues with
Apple’s recent security upgrade for iTunes accounts, but it’s
hard to know what to make of such reports until you experience the
problems yourself. And, sadly, I can now understand what others have
gone through.
One morning last week, I went to my Mac to find two separate email
messages, both sent at 2:00 AM, saying that changes had been made to
my Apple ID. Keep in mind that these came out of the blue — I had
not been asked the new security questions or had to provide a
secondary email address. The first message said that my billing
address and credit card had been changed. The second said my Apple
ID and email address had been changed. Needless to say (or I
wouldn’t be writing this report), I had made no changes to my
billing address and credit card information, as the first message
claimed. The second message was even more confusing, since as far as
I’m aware, it’s impossible to change an Apple ID, much as it
would be nice if Apple would allow us to merge them.
It was 8:00 AM when I saw these messages, meaning that there had
been at least 6 hours in between the time the messages were
triggered and when I sat down at my Mac. Fearing that my account had
been compromised, I tried to log in to my iTunes account, and was
unable to do so. After resetting my password, I was finally able to
log in successfully, and while I was still somewhat concerned about
my account having been compromised, I figured that changing the
password would at least prevent any more problems from occurring.
Little did I know…
At 8:00 PM that same night, I received another email message from
the iTunes Store, this time a receipt for a $40 iTunes gift
certificate that I had supposedly purchased. Again, I had done no
such thing, and oddly, the address (my address) on the receipt was
in San Diego, even though I live in Wichita, Kansas, and have a
billing address of Garden City, KS. But this wasn’t a simple
matter of someone trying to buy an iTunes gift certificate with my
credit card, since the receipt said the order was charged to my
American Express card. I haven’t had an American Express card in
years. Strangest of all was the description of the gift certificate
itself, which read: “Gift certificate for foobar” (where
“foobar” was actually my former Apple ID password). That’s
right, Apple had somehow inserted my former password into the
description field. Cue the Twilight Zone music.
Before logging in to my iTunes account, I checked a few other Apple
services and couldn’t get into any of them. So I once again reset
my password and logged in to iTunes. This time it appeared that I
had a brand new account — it knew my email address was
owenc@hubris.net, but everything else acted as though I’d never
logged in before. My iTunes Store history was empty. Although iTunes
said I had iOS app updates pending, when I tried to get them, I was
told “You can’t update this app because you’ve never purchased
it,” and the same thing happened when I tried to use the App Store
app on my iPhone to download updates. I hopped over to the Web and
tried to log in to my Apple developer account, only to find that I
could no longer access any of the developer-specific iOS resources,
and worse, all my iOS app provisioning data was missing. Lastly, I
checked for updates to apps I had purchased in the Mac App Store,
and received the same error as in the iOS App Store. But it also
said something to the effect of “These apps are in your
owenc1@hubris.net account. Log in there to update them.” I’ve
never had such an account with Apple, and owenc1@hubris.net isn’t
even a valid email address.
Despite these cascading failures, the one thing that continued to
work was iCloud on my iPhone. When I checked into why, I saw that my
iCloud settings had somehow been changed to use that phantom
owenc1@hubris.net address — at no point did I ever update my
iCloud settings on the iPhone or enter owenc1@hubris.net anywhere.
Nor had I entered a new password for iCloud on the iPhone, even
though I’d changed my Apple ID password twice in the past 12
hours. Even now, I have no idea how Apple could have changed iCloud
settings on my iPhone remotely. Luckily, I don’t rely on iCloud
for calendaring or email; there’s no telling what havoc would have
been played with my day if my events or email had become confused.
Clearly, it was time to get help, but that was much easier said than
done. As far as I can tell, there is no way to contact Apple about
an Apple ID problem. After a few hours, I figured out that I could
use Apple’s Express Lane service to open an iTunes Store-related
trouble ticket. Unfortunately, this ultimately led me to a blank
page, and only after several unsuccessful attempts did I think of
using a Web browser other than Safari, and doing that — ironically —
enabled me to file a report at about 9:30 PM.
At 2:00 PM the following day, I finally received an email response
from Apple. Alas, it was simply a canned message that gave me a long
list of ways I could avoid being tricked by phishing. Since that
wasn’t my problem, I responded to the message, pointing this out.
An hour or so later, though, Apple sent me yet another message
saying that everything had been restored, and when I logged in to
the iTunes Store, the Mac App Store, and my developer account, I did
indeed once again have access to all my data. Apple provided no
explanation for the problem, but at least everything was working as
it had before.
All but one thing, that is. Remember how my iCloud account on my
iPhone had been inexplicably changed to the owenc1@hubris.net
address that doesn’t exist? Even after Apple restored my account
data, iCloud on the iPhone retained that incorrect address and
stopped working entirely. Since it apparently isn’t possible to
change the Apple ID associated with iCloud on the iPhone, I was
forced to delete my iCloud account entirely and set up a new one
using the proper owenc@hubris.net address. Once I had done that,
everything was again right in my Apple world.
If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that Apple has put all our
eggs into a single Apple ID basket, and while we can watch that
basket all we want, if Apple messes something up behind the scenes,
we’re the ones left with egg on our faces and no obvious way to
get help.
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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 7 May 2012
----------------------------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
**Alfred 1.2** -- Running with Crayons has updated its free
keyboard-driven launcher Alfred to version 1.2 with a number of new
features. Available from the Alfred Web site as well as the Mac App
Store, this release adds two new themes, large type support for
displaying text and calculations, and the capability to drag files
out of Alfred search results into the Finder, Apple Mail, and other
apps. Its search matching algorithm has also been overhauled with a
noncontinuous word-based matching scheme to improve results.
However, to take advantage of all the improvements in this release,
you’ll need to download the app from the Alfred Web site (the Mac
App Store version is limited due to Apple’s sandboxing rules).
Plus, to unlock all the features, you would need to purchase the
Alfred Powerpack for £15. With the Powerpack-enhanced Alfred 1.2,
you’ll get 1Password 1Click bookmark integration, which enables
you to access a list of passwords quickly and then open a selected
bookmark in your default Web browser. You can also merge currently
selected text with the previous item in the clipboard’s history.
Finally, global hotkeys have been enhanced with the option to paste
the most recent clipboard item as plain text without having to first
show Alfred, as well as the capability to assign snippets for
instant pasting. (Free, £15 for Powerpack, 2.5 MB, release notes)
Read/post comments about Alfred 1.2.
**Transmit 4.1.9** -- It has been some time since its last update, but
Panic has now released Transmit 4.1.8 with a modicum of fixes and
improvements for the file transfer software. The update fixes a
kernel panic that occurred with Transmit Disk when using OS X 10.8
Mountain Lion as well as a possible crash when viewing a mount point
folder after unmounting a drive. It also adds support for Growl 1.3,
improves compatibility with AS/400 and Personal FTP Server Pro, and
updates the item count when filtering in the list view file browser.
Other fixes address an issue with double contextual menus and
miscellaneous display issues. A quick 4.1.9 update fixes a possible
issue with the Transmit Disk menu extra, addresses a keychain issue
in 10.6 Snow Leopard, and improves Growl compatibility again. ($34
new, free update, 22.4 MB, release notes)
Read/post comments about Transmit 4.1.8.
**SpamSieve 2.9.1** -- C-Command Software has released SpamSieve
2.9.1, which primarily addresses the recent release of Microsoft
Outlook 2011 SP2 (for the most recent update, see “Microsoft
Office for Mac 2011 14.2.1,” 26 April 2012). If you’ve
previously used Outlook 2011, the spam-filtering software will
update its scripts automatically. However, if you have a new
installation of Outlook 2011, you can choose Install Outlook Scripts
from the SpamSieve menu to start running your rules. Additionally,
SpamSieve 2.9.1 addresses some problems with its Apple Mail plug-in,
detecting any damage and attempting to auto-heal the installed copy
of the plug-in as well alert you to download and install a fresh
copy. The release also no longer triggers Mac OS X’s “accept
incoming network connections” firewall dialog, plus adds some
exception guards to work around bugs in the Growl SDK. ($30 new,
free update, 9.1 MB, release notes)
Read/post comments about SpamSieve 2.9.1.
**Hazel 3.0.5** -- Noodlesoft has released Hazel 3.0.5 with a
profusion of fixes to the file cleanup utility. The update
reintroduces the unintentionally removed “enclosing folder” as a
destination for move/copy operations, as well as rewords condition
targets to add clarity. It improves support for Growl, now allowing
colon usage in Growl message patterns (as well as comments),
breaking Growl options out of the pattern interface and into its own
popover, and enabling you to format Growl patterns like other
patterns. The release also fixes an issue where Hazel didn’t
trigger certain rules, primarily those that were dependent on folder
size or sub-item count. Noodlesoft notes that you may find some
rules “re-firing” after the upgrade due to changes in rules
formatting and the internal database, but this should occur only
once. ($25 new, $10 upgrade, 5.0 MB, release notes)
Read/post comments about Hazel 3.0.5.
ExtraBITS for 7 May 2012
------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
We have lots of extra bits for you to check out this week, starting
with a warning for those who used FileVault in Snow Leopard and then
upgraded to Lion, a heads-up about the FBI looking to increase
wiretapping capabilities, news of an improvement to the iPad 2, a
nicely presented business argument against DRM, a report about
Oracle taking over Java updates for Mac OS X, and an amusing parody
of Apple’s 1984 ad that Apple itself made for its sales force.
**FileVault Passwords Potentially Logged in Plain Text** -- Although
details are still appearing, Sophos is reporting that a particular
combination of circumstances can result in FileVault passwords being
exposed in plain-text log files. The combination is somewhat
unlikely — the Mac had to be using FileVault 1 under Mac OS X 10.6
Snow Leopard, be upgraded to 10.7 Lion, and then updated to 10.7.3,
all without switching to FileVault 2. Nevertheless, if this applies
to you, change that password!
Read/post comments
**FBI Looking to Expand CALEA to Web Sites** -- Declan McCullagh at
CNET is reporting that the FBI is looking to expand CALEA — the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act — to apply to
Web sites and services like iCloud, iChat, FaceTime, Twitter,
Facebook, Skype, Gmail, and Hotmail. Passed in 1994, CALEA currently
requires telecommunications companies to make their systems
wiretap-friendly; CALEA was extended to broadband networks in 2004.
Technology companies are generally unhappy about such expansions,
and Apple is lobbying on the topic now. Mandated backdoors, apart
from being generally creepy even when used only with court orders,
also pose serious security risks.
Read/post comments
**Quietly Revised iPad 2 Sports Better Battery Life** -- In April
2012, Apple started shipping a slight variant on the iPad 2 that
remains for sale even as the third-generation iPad has become the
mainstay of the line. This new version of the iPad 2 — labeled
internally as “iPad 2,4” — uses a 32-nanometer version of
Apple’s A5 chip that replaces the 45nm version in the previous
iPad 2 model. The processing performance is the same, but AnandTech
is reporting that the 32nm model has notably better battery life
(and a lower manufacturing cost). Alas, there is no way to know if
any given iPad 2 uses the new chip without running an app that
reports on the internals.
Read/post comments
**Analyzing the Business Case for DRM** -- In a chapter excerpted from
a book on WordPress, Kirk Biglione offers a nice rundown of the
costs of DRM, to readers, to publishers, to retailers, and to the
world at large. It’s especially apropos, given that 4 May 2012 was
the fourth annual “Day Against DRM.”
Read/post comments
**Oracle Takes Over Java Updates for Mac OS X** -- Ars Technica
reports that Oracle, the company that manages the Java development
environment, has taken over distribution of Java for Mac OS X 10.7
Lion (older versions are not supported). Since Apple has failed to
update Java as quickly as Oracle has in the past, this should mean
that Mac users will be protected from future Java vulnerabilities
more quickly. Unfortunately, this 1.7.0_04 release of Java does not
support the Java Plugin and Java Web Start applications, meaning
that Java applets won’t be available to Mac users who install
Oracle’s code. Therefore, it’s probably best holding off on
Oracle’s version of Java until those pieces are available, or
until a new security vulnerability makes it unavoidable.
Read/post comments
**Apple Made 1984 Parody Ad for Sales Force** -- Apple made an
in-house parody ad of its famous “1984” ad called “1944”
that has to be seen to be believed. A long-ago Apple employee, Craig
Elliott, provided the video to Network World’s Paul McNamara.
Steve Jobs does an impression of FDR, among other bizarre moments.
It was made to pump up Apple’s sales force, and may not have been
seen since 1984.
Read/post comments
$$
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